The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA

Abstract #52023

Naomi Rogers, PhD, Women's and Gender Studies Program, Yale University, PO Box 208319, 316 WLH, New Haven, CT 06520-8319, 2034320847, Naomi.Rogers@yale.edu

By the mid-1960s, as health care became an integral part of the liberal government programs of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, community medicine gained new prominence and promise. Policy makers and especially health activists began to see community medicine as a way, perhaps the best way, to transform American health care, and force medical schools and teaching hospitals to be more responsive to the social and medical needs of their local communities. Student health activists, newly organized in the Student Health Organizations (1965-1970) saw community medicine as the medical equivalent of participatory democracy, a means to undermine the process and effects of medical professional socialization, and to create a new kind of medicine and a new kind of health care provider. By the late 1960s, however, community health centers had become battlegrounds, as Black Panthers and Puerto-Rican nationalists demanded community control and rejected the liberal reformer as a racist interloper. The rise and fall of SHO and its notion of community medicine will be the focus of this paper.

Learning Objectives:

• Describe the relationship between community activism and community health centers during the 1960s.

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.